I have deviated quite massively from the premise of this challenge it feels like. Fell behind due to having to work and fell behind further this weekend as I’ve haven’t been home. Despite all that though I’m committed to getting something together for this. I’ve gotten a quite clear idea on what the game is going to be, even though it’s still a long way away.

Anyhow, for this hour, I decided to focus on the visuals. I’m a programmer by nature and as I’m doing this all by self I’m going for some sort of glorified programmer-art approach. Fiddled with a color scheme to get something coherent, which sort of failed. I’m probably going to ask someone to just make me a nice palette, or I’ll find a nice one somewhere. After feeling somewhat done with colors, I moved on to shapes which is incredibly easier, as I’m going for an abstract style.

Got the idea to make all the shapes meshes, mainly to maintain perfect crispness on all resolutions. Which would go hand in hand with the scaling solution I’ve done already. It was a bit fiddly getting the mesh to render but finally grasped how it’s done. Apparently it’s not possible to access the vertex color that’s baked in the file, which sort of sucks. I planned to use the vertex color to do some funky gradients and general coloring of the meshes. We’ll see what I do instead. Single colors should be really easy to achieve anyways.

Got a lot done today. Managed to do a proper solution for scaling as I wrote about in the last post. The game now scales to fit without stretching, which makes it actually playable in all possible resolutions (although I’m still focusing on portrait). Fortunately I wasn’t the only person to have this idea/problem and I managed to find a somewhat complete solution on the Defold forums.

I also implemented positional death triggers for the the player which was made possible by solving the scaling/stretch problem. This means that you can actually reset when you go out of bounds (the end menu appears). I’m not quite sure what’s up next, perhaps the reusable gui button mentioned in the previous post, or perhaps some particle effect for the player death. No matter exactly what’s up next, it’s getting exciting.

Been incredibly busy with Three Lines and Braindust last few days and fell behind a bit on the challenge. I’m in the process of catching up and I’m making great progress! Currently you can bounce between the sides and change direction mid air. Also made it so the player is mostly stationary, while the level scrolls past, getting this to feel smooth yet “physical” was quite tricky, as you can tell in the below timelapse it took quite some tweaking.

The player will also get pulled down (relatively) so they’re always on the same offset from the button. This is done by speeding up the level scrolling temporarily, to give the impression of the camera catching up. This particular effect doesn’t look as good as it can at the moment, as the start of the “pulldown” is sort of jerky. This is mostly because of the effect only happening when the player is touching a wall, probably it’d be best if it happens in-air if the player was above a certain threshold as well. That’s for the future though.

Dabbled about with the GUI system as well. There’s a lot of manual labor when setting stuff up, but it seems like it does have anything you could need. Managed to set up a few buttons and hook them up to loading/unloading the main gameplay collection. When it comes to GUI, next up I’m really tempted to try to make a reusable generic button object. Not sure how it would work exactly, but stuff I’ve seen so far (mostly while being lost in the Defold interface) points to it being possible.

The very next thing I’m planning to do is making sure you can actually die. Initially a position check on the x axis would be simplest solution. There’s some issues with that though, Defold seems to stretch to fit by default (not GUI though) which makes stuff look somewhat hideous. As the width of the play area needs to be constant (for gameplay), without stretching (for looks), I’m gonna need to do something to fit the play area in the center of the screen no matter the aspect ratio. Probably it’d be a sensible strategy to make it look okay on narrowest aspect ratio and then fill the sides with something not-so-important (blank space!).